TRENDING

DOD administers system cure

By Florence Olsen

Aug 11, 1997

Some medical logistics problems are too complex for military personnel to solve without help from an intelligent algorithm.

That's why the Defense Department has spent more than $25 million on a medical decision-support system to improve the efficiency of theater airlift and medical evacuation. The development cost will reach $40 million by the end of 1997.

When the U.S. Transportation Command airlifted patients during the Gulf War, 60 percent were sent to a different hospital than originally planned.

"The patients weren't at risk because we sent them to the wrong hospital, but we had a larger administrative burden than we thought," said Air Force Lt. Col. Corey Kirschner, the functional program manager for the new DOD system.

Beginning this month, the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., will bring online a preliminary version of the USTRANSCOM Regulating and Command and Control Evacuation System, or TRAC2ES (pronounced traces).

The decision-support system contains a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to help military staff balance supply and demand for hospital beds and patient transport.

"The human brain doesn't do well with bulky mathematical problems," said William C. Elm, director of advanced decision-support systems for Carnegie Group Inc. of Pittsburgh, which designed the scheduling algorithm and user interface.

Officials said TRAC2ES is the first system of its kind to integrate hospital bed, airlift and patient data with theater plans and schedules. It also will help medical staff keep track of individual patients' status and location.

TRAC2ES will run initially on three connected Sun Microsystems Inc. Sparc 2000 servers at USTRANSCOM headquarters and on similar server clusters in Germany and Japan. Medical staff will use World Wide Web browsers to access the distributed global database.

Supporting the two-way data feeds is an object-oriented database built with object tools from Versant Object Technology Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif.

The Versant database has just been approved for DOD's Common Operating Environment.

"Our engineers are really pushing the envelope on the capabilities of Versant," Kirschner said, making demands on the company and becoming "one of its biggest beta testers."

He said TRAC2CES will be maintained through a combination of local and global backup functions. "We're looking at a disaster recovery plan for replicating the global database, but we really haven't solved that yet," he said.

The scheduling algorithm, written in C++ and Java, acts as a capable assistant that can forecast two to five days out and reschedule plans. For example, the algorithm calculates how many landings a patient can tolerate and how much rest is needed between landing and takeoff.

"All of those significant constraints are what the scheduling engine juggles," the Carnegie Group's Elm said. The algorithm tries to solve the problem in the aggregate while still respecting each component. The same algorithm can apply to a broad range of command and control problems, he said.

The problem with drill-down interfaces that look simpler on the surface, Elm said, is remembering what you are drilling for. Drilling down takes too many mouse clicks, he said.

The developers of TRAC2ES used cognitive systems engineering and artificial intelligence methods and tools, plus government-developed and commercial software including C++ libraries from Rogue Wave Software Inc. of Corvallis, Ore.

The Versant object database has powerful locking features for distributed applications, Elm said. Versant's product was the most compatible with the Rumbaugh object modeling technique and the computer-aided software engineering tool from ParaSoft Corp. of Monrovia, Calif., that DOD used to build the C++ application code.

The decision-support system will reside on the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) and have two-way data interfaces to the Global Transportation Network. It's supposed to be ready for DOD initial operational capability by next July, and useful life should extend through 2005, Kirschner said.

USTRANSCOM plans to retire the mainframe-based Defense Medical Regulating Information System and the PC-based Automated Patient Evacuation System by December 1998.

The command awarded a series of task orders for TRAC2ES to Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego under the Defense Medical Information Management/ Systems Integration, Design, Development, Operations and Maintenance Services contract.